For 18 years, the Cancer Informatics Shared Resource (CISR) has promoted high quality, innovative cancer research by providing members of the UWCCC with an informatics intellectual resource and an advanced biomedical computing environment. The CISR has continually evolved to address the emerging need of cancer research. Recent developments include progress toward new computational facilities and new CISR faculty from the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics. These faculty bring expertise in bioinformatics, imaging and visualization techniques. Additional faculty with expertise in clinical informatics is expected. As a matter of policy, computing support within the University and Medical School is decentralized and largely the responsibility of individual departments and centers, such as the UWCCC, to manage and fund. Consequently the CISR plays an essential role and contributes to all UWCCC researchers in a cost effective manner. The CISR accomplishes this in three ways. (1) It promotes multi-disciplinary collaboration by providing access to a range of skills and expertise in computational science, informatics, and biomedical computing. (2) CISR faculty and professional staff fulfill an important leadership role by tracking and anticipating the needs of the UWCCC research community and then developing specialized informatics facilities to meet those needs. (3) CISR staff are responsible for an array of computing services and a computing infrastructure funded with user fees. These services are used by UWCCC investigators, other science-oriented shared resources, and the UWCCC administration. For example, CISR faculty collaborate with Drs. Gould, Moser, Bradfield and Newton in computational genetics. Gould, Moser and Newton have used CISR facilities to build genetic maps of mice and rats. Drs. Newton and Reznikoff to test new methods for assessing gene loss, Dr. Lindstrom to develop new statistical models for radiation cell survival curves.